I don’t quite agree with this one. Being considered a reliable specialist would imply to me that my character now is locked into that role moving forward. I only played Horde’s main quest stories here with the blood trolls, loas, and Talanji. I felt engaged with it and never quite felt like I was directly forced into doing it (but I think there was something gatekept behind it? I don’t quite remember).
To not have something forced upon my character once I start the main plot quest chain
is much more rewarding to me as it will trick myself into thinking that the illusion of choice is genuine. Folding Ideas on YouTube did an excellent dissertation of this concept with his video “World of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind”. Essentially it breaks down maybe even the most important aspect of the appeal of Classic, that the lack of direction in the game forces you be active in looking for things to do and explore, rather than having things like the main quest lines being unavoidable, mandatory, and forced upon you. I get it, not everyone prefers that, but I strongly do.
Even though I felt like I was “the right person at the right place, at the right time” it was within my agency to continue. It was made clear to me once I started that my support made a genuine difference. That isn’t luck. Sure, maybe to get going, but I always felt like my character was being acknowledged as someone that assisted in making a difference, and that they wanted me there. I felt encouraged, not forced into it, and I liked that.
Edit: Though, this experience I described was on the Zandalar island. On the Kul Tiras island with the Sylvanas line I mainly just felt like a passive bystander as the characters that I was assisting already felt competent enough to do it themselves. Almost like they let me do things out of pity or something.
Yeah “Horde versus Alliance, wounds that can never be healed” they said… Then they came up with the Azerite plot, which made this promise impossible to keep because it put the focus on something that completely transcended the faction war (and even negated it). I mean if what is at stake is literally the world dying, then the only option is to unite, and those who choose not to instantly become the obvious villains. So that faction war expansion that they promised us turned out to be about saving the world from Sylvanas Gallywix and N’Zoth, witnessing the Forsaken make contact with Humans and for some of them DEFECT TO THE ALLIANCE (???) under the supervision of the not-really-queen of Lordaeron, and uniting under the banner of Azeroth.
The ultimate lie being of course what they did with the Sylvanas loyalist route.
(Ok the Gathering wasn’t actually shown in game but its consequences run throughout BFA).
And that’s a shame because damn despite its flaws the first half was good. Zandalar (both the continent and the storyline/characters) was amazing to me.
I believe it was the World Quests that were locked behind it, but personally i don’t believe that a “Run around and look for ways to help people” really fit the narrative being sold to us, even if there is nothing wrong with it conceptually. The whole idea of Zandalar is that you’re an elite Horde operative, who seeks to earn the loyalty of Zandalar so it’s really jarring, when you say go into the forbidden swamp, in order to fight against the blood trolls, who are an existential threat and you can’t lose time only to run about like you have ADHD, with an NPC popping up like they’re that guy in the van from spy movies “You see that random thing? That’s actually a really high priority target mate!” taking me out of the experience nearly without a fault.
I’ve seen the video previously and i kind of echo the ultimate sentiment that generally it’s charming the first time, but that novelty wears off pretty quickly, especially if you enter after the initial boom of the launch period. Personally I’m of the opinion that WotLK, Cata, MoP was for me the sweet spot of perfect balance between everything being a janky monotonous grind and mandatory ADHD insanity, with a solid narrative to tie it together into a cohesive package. (MoP did go overboard with the dailies on launch tho like waaay overboard)
I don’t mind Azerite, as a plot device, which informs the actions of both factions, as they race to try and make use of it, because it’s a huge gamechanger and falling behind translates to inevitable loss. And truth be told it could have been addressed, if Blizzard actually bothered to explore the Horde side of things past Sylvanas being too mean to the Horde’s way past possibility of reconciliation hated enemies to a point, where Saurfang, who up to that point has been the posterboy of the fundamentally Kratocratic Orc culture the Horde is based around decides to mope around in an Aliance sewer instead of adhering to his own cultural sensibilities and values, until Anduin gives him a pep talk… This is Last of Us 2 level of character assassinating car crash storytelling.
That for me was the breaking point, after that i just didn’t have any more benefit of the doubt left for where the story was headed. A feeling that only really got vindicated by the ending N’zoth got and the disjointed mess that is Shadowlands. (The zones on their own out of context are solid, but it all crumbles, when it’s supposed to tie together, because at this point it feels more like cosmicbabble trivia bingo than anything resembling a coherent competently constructed narrative)
Oh I completely agree, don’t get me wrong I think Azerite as an incredibly powerful and valuable new ore that both factions need to get their hands on because it could change the course of the war would have been a great plot. But very very soon its nature as Azeroth’s blood was revealed and the possibility for such a plot crumbled in the blink of an eye.
To be fair though, even before that, that potential was already jeopardized when Anduin’s first reaction upon learning about it was “wow we must take it first to ensure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands” (the wrong hands being the Horde’s of course). He just couldn’t be pragmatic about it, he just couldn’t consider it a strategic resource, he had to attach grand morals to it. It’s like the Alliance is not allowed to be the Horde’s actual counterpart, its actual rival, it can only be its safeguard, the spiritual guide that saves it from itself.
Hamfisted borrowed power progression systems and the wierd story surounding them, eh?.. We can only hope they learn their lesson after SL xD
Could have actually been a neat twist for the .3 patch, instead of speedrunning through the whole unleashed Old God end of the world scenario, because a massive war against one of the most influential villains of the franchise wouldn’t be as interesting, as some new dude, who does basically the same thing, but is the real master of the Dreadlords so he technically created the Burning LEgion and was the real Lich King, which just kind of ends up in a wierd spot, where he was fighting himself on 3 fronts, for some stupid reason. /rant
Could have been alright, if the Horde saw him as a self righteous naive hypocrite, who can’t even control his own faction half the time and basically operates on good faith Varian built up. (Basically Anduin facing some genuine hardship and opposition for once instead of being writer’s pet that can never be wrong) Doesn’t have to be entirely right since the amount of Horde characters that actually met and know him is like single digits, while Sylvanas is concerned about the actions of his children and grandchildren during this window of vulnerability. (Would make sense given that elves live dozens of times longer than humans, even when not undead)
Don’t get me started on Anduin… I’m not necessarily against having a character that represents the modern conscience. I’m not against that character having an influence on the plot. But if it comes from nowhere it’s just… insulting to everyone around them. And with Anduin everything just came out of nowhere. Why was he such a strong proponent of peace, and willing to take any risk to get it? Because any child could see that the wars were wrong, and the people that didn’t realize that were just petty poopholes. It’s not that letting go of old hatreds was a lesson a character like a Velen, a Thrall, a Faol, a Saurfang or a Genn had to learn the hard way, it was just an obvious truth. Just listen to the children! Morality is easy!
And just as ridiculous was his rise to power. How did he convince the Alliance to follow his ideas? By being born the son of a human king, of course! How he became High King isn’t even worth mentioning for Blizzard since… really, what more than royal blood does Alliance leadership need? Dogs like Genn follow any master loyaly, and why would anyone of those ancient leaders ever think they knew better than a 20-year-old who got his idealistic ideas from… being a good boy! Anyone who would defy him obviously is a villain like Sylvanas or a magicked rage-machine like Tyrande!
Really, I hate this character for how he drags down everything around him. To me he doesn’t feel like part of the world, but like a running commentary on it. If morality is easy, then any war plot is stupid.
My experience is somewhat limited. I have spent quite a lot of time in both Star Wars: The Old Republic and in Guild Wars 2. I’ve been more invested in the former. That game did tell some great stories but they felt separated from the actual game. You were alone in instanced pockets throughout the world where you got to be the hero. You could have taken the stories from SWTOR and put them in single player games and I honestly think that the overall experience would have benefited. In contrast, I don’t think vanilla World of Warcraft would have been particularly interesting as a single player game.
As for Guild Wars 2, I don’t think they did the story particularly well at all. It was, at best, mediocre. Yet they obviously spent a lot of time and effort in making the stories, cutscenes, and voice acting. The world is beautiful and colourful yet for some reason it felt flaccid. When you go to, say, “Lornar’s Pass”, you don’t feel as though there’s a story in the environment. A quick visit to the GW2 wiki spells out the story of the zone’s namesake in one sentence. The name “Lordearon” packs a whole lot more than that.
I don’t think that traditional storytelling methods are appropriate for the MMORPG genre. Yet having a linear player-centric story has become the norm these days and it’s a development I oppose. Or maybe the problem is simply that these stories are always too grandiose. Like in The Elder Scrolls Online you’re not just some adventurer in Tamriel – no, you’re told from the get-go that you’re super special because you’re the soulless one (a character bound to some prophecy or other). You get some unique abilities due to you being the soulless one. Abilities you’ll see everyone else in the world use as well. I guess this is where Blizzard got the inspiration for the Champion of Azeroth.
This is why I don’t think any modern MMORPG have done the narrative well. I think games should utilize the affordances of their own interactivity rather than mimic the film medium. A good game story cannot be judged by a textual reading of it, you have to consider how it is intervowen with the actual gameplay. The story of Half-Life is much better experienced in the game rather than through the transcript.
Maybe I mostly mean that some MMOs are more successful in delivering a story that satisfies their customers. We can argue if that is despite their story or because of it, but looking at the recent popularity of FFXIV I think that there has to be something about that integrated single player story that works for them. And I do think WoW could have had that, too. Not sure if the game would have been better with it than without it, but WoW’s story didn’t have to land on the list of negatives of the game as it did.
I’m not sure if places like “Ascalon” don’t pack a similar punch with people who learned about GW when they were more impressionable. For me they don’t, but any game would have a hard time recreating that for me by now. Also… Lordaeron is an interesting case, because almost all of the investment in that one came from WCIII, not WoW.
True enough. Taste is subjective, but I guess it’s fair to say that FFXIV has a playerbase that appreciates the game’s narrative and WoW has a playerbase that doesn’t. Personally I couldn’t get into FFXIV. People kept telling me that the story gets real good when you get to the first expansion, but getting there is quite the time investment. When I played it I also didn’t feel that it was an MMORPG, and that’s probably what put me off the most.
Even if World of Warcraft had managed to create a story that was appreciated, I would likely still have complained about the manner in which the story is told. I did as much for SWTOR. I actually really liked SWTOR, I had a great time in that game. But I always felt that they got the story wrong. The overall story was told in instances, and once you were done with them you were in “narrative limbo”. The world felt static and dead.
This kind of neatly addresses my point – when I started playing World of Warcraft I had not played the RTS games. I was uninitiated to the world and the story and yet I felt like there was a backstory in every environment. I never experienced that in Guild Wars 2. At one point I even started looking at lore videos about the game world, but these days I can’t really say that there is much I remember.
This kind of extends to other aspects of the game as well. There was a reason orcs couldn’t be priests, and there was a reason night elves couldn’t be mages. Not sure if there was a reason why humans couldn’t be hunters but I guess that one was due to a technical limitation (no race could have more than 6 classes in vanilla for some reason). In Guilds Wars 2 I chose to play a human Guardian, yet I could have picked any of the available races. The World of Warcraft equivalent, the Paladin, has a ton of lore surrounding it. The Guardian? I didn’t even know where they got their powers from. It’s never explained in the game. The humans had 6 gods, was one of those gods connected to the Guardian’s power in some way? Maybe, it’s not an answer I ever discovered. And where did the sylvari Guardians get their powers from? Who knows!
Azeroth had some good world building, and it was that world building that maintained my interest even when the story began to reek. Shadowlands changed all that. I can’t bring myself to play Shadowlands, not just because the story is awful, but because I feel nothing for the world of the Shadowlands.
I actually tried multiple times, and got as far as the second addon… But nope, I still didn’t get into it. It’s not that the story was bad, I just didn’t care for a world full of catgirls and shiver creepy doll people, and where everyone is treated the same, and the story couldn’t compensate for my disinterest in the world. So I do assume we are relatively similar types of players. Having such a story within WoW certainly wouldn’t have improved the world for me. But I do think it would have for many others, so I find it hard to see that as a very relevant criticism. It’s not a mistake to focus on the story. It’s just that you are adressing a different target audience. And I do think it’s perfectly fine for WoW to go where they think their target audience is, even if that means moving away from me. But ditching me just to drive everything in the garbage, like they have been doing? Well, now that’s a mistake.
I’m kinda experiencing it now, actually. I’m going in blind, and slowly discovering lore factoids everywhere. I might be wrong but yes, at the moment it deels like most places I am visiting have significance I haven’t realized yet. Some places more than others, obviously, but that’s no different from WoW.
I’ll certainly grant you that player powers in GW2 are underdefined. Not sure if I’d agree that vanilla WoW was very good at that, though. I mean, knowing that there is some Light they revere is certainly better than nothing, but it’s not exactly much, either. Especially when you put him next to a priest that’s spamming shadow Stuff as well as Light stuff. Are hunters magic? Are rogues? Is rage just a game mechanic? What’s the magic mages use, and how does their stuff relate to shamans or warlocks? Is the warlock shadow the same as the priest’s? Some of these questions have been answered. Some of these answers have been retconned. And class quests often didn’t have much to do with that, as nice as they were to have. I certainly wouldn’t mind some class quests in GW, but I haven’t missed them that much, either. WoW has trained me well to fill in the large gaps all around me for myself…
You may be right, but I’m torn. It may be that they’ll reach a larger audience by “playing it safe” and offering a cinematic experience where the player is guaranteed to play a vital role, but I still can’t help but feel that that type of storytelling doesn’t suit an MMO even if there are MMOs that use that type of storytelling and that are successful.
Maybe it’s the curse of age I find myself in a niche audience with little pull whilst all the up and comin’ youngsters demand Marvel action in everything they consume.
One aspect I liked about the Light was that there were different interpretations of it. You had the humans and the dwarves who had a belief system that is reminiscent of real life christianity, but you also had the night elves who seemed to draw from the exact same magic but with an entirely different explanation. Today we likely have a hierarchy that explains how they’re all connected which is a pity in my opinion, but I digress. I much prefer some explanation rather than no explanation. As for the Priests using shadow and holy spells… well, I agree. My first main that I played in 2007 was a draenei Priest, and to this day I still remember the lame justification the draenei Priest trainer gave me: “Even the light casts shadows” or somesuch. The Priest is a bit of an enigma.
With Guild Wars 2 I felt that it was hard to place my character in the world since the game didn’t really tell me anything about it. I won’t let my pessimism colour your experience of it, though. There are parts of Guild Wars 2 that are truly great – but I don’t think the story is one.
Well… that might be true, but game devs don’t really have to care how mmo their mmo is. Not even ideally. They should care about their world, sure. They should care about the stories they tell. They should care about making it fun. But about making it as mmo as they can? I don’t think there is inherent value in that.
That really always felt like engine restrictions to me. We had seen Night Elf priests in WCIII, and those were in no way comparable to priests of the Light. And while I would have liked to see different interpretations of that religion between dwarves and humans… there really weren’t any. No wonder, considering how poorly defined it was.
Interesting. For me choosing a personal story and playing through it felt like a much more personal connection to the world than knowing that there was a school where my mage was trained or that that paladin has some vaguely defined religion. But that might be a matter of taste once again. I certainly agree that ideally there should be some defined context for your class. But ideally information about pretty much everything my character experienced should be available. And as a WoW RPer I can certainly say that the stuff we don’t know about the world our characters grew up in is the vast majority of stuff.
There is kind of a balance to be struck there. Of course no game dev sets out to make a game that’s a boring uninspired mess.
One thing i can tell for sure is that in the last few expansions their systems have not complemented the story they wanted to tell, which leads us to a startling contrast of the unique super special chosen one doing random busywork, on a whim and having to prove themselves to absolute strangers, for the 9th time, in a row. Nothing wrong with either, but together it’s about as startling as having Spaghetti Carbonara, with the sour jelly spaghetti instead of noodles.
What I mean to say is that the narrative in an MMORPG should be designed in such a way that it doesn’t force the player to exclude every other player in the game in order for the world to make sense. That’s kind of what I hated about class halls in Legion – the story put you on a pedestal for your chosen class, but every other player you saw around you were put on the same pedestal. A position that is supposed to be unique. And BFA made this a thousand times worse…
I want to believe there’s some value in that and that people just aren’t aware of it… but that might be wishful thinking on my part.
And the irony is that these menial tasks are often much more engaging than the the quests that forward the main plot. One of my favourite quests in BFA was the quest chain where you have to prove that Lucille Waycrest isn’t a witch. I guess that’s technically part of the main story as you have to do it but uh… I liked it anyway.
I guess a better example would be the quests you got from setting up outposts via the mission table. I remember one where a group of goblins set up camp in Drustvar and you basically have to help them out. It’s quite simple but it suited the narrative of the conflict, and the camp was premanent so there was some sense of progression.
I personally had more of a problem with the colossal monotonisation and outstanding contortionism of the unique organisations that made them up, in order for the Orders to be even plausible. (Ebon Blade, Illidari and Council of Fell Harvest being notable exceptions thanks to their pre-existing lore, as basically renegades doing their own thing)
Those two examples i wouldn’t include into menial busywork, because you needed Lucille, as the scion of house Waycrest to help you sort out the political situation of Kul’tiras and setting up the footholds within the different zones of the opposing faction’s island made sense too.
I’m more talking about stuff like you running around Zuldazzar and suddenly you get like Talanji out of nowhere telling you “In that cave there is a top tier threat gorilla and i need it’s rear end!” and you’re there just like “Woman I’m busy trying to stop Zul from murdering all your gods!”
the thing with ff 14 is that the story is the selling point so if your not into the story it’s not the game for you ARR can feel like a slog but it all factors into later expansions which why the community is so against people using the story skip ye sure it has raids and such but beyond duty finder it’s not canon so savage, extreme never actually happen as far as the story is concerned heck the story establishes that you did most of the primal fights solo and the other members of the raid or trial are generally not wol’s infact in Shadowbringers they it canon that the Hero’s power is to summon his or her friends to fight along side them so they made canon duty finder
i grew up with final fantasy games i’ve played them all even the obscure ones and i play the previous Square Enix MMO Final Fantasy 11 for 7 years while i was also playing wow so i don’t mind the story focus but i’m not sure it would really work for wow without massive structure change to how they tell the story if 90 % of your story is in books it won’t work
heck if there something they could not fit into expansion they generally make little short stories on their websites about it … for free imagine that
don’t get me wrong though i’m not saying Square Enix is perfect infact no asian company will be they most likely have just as many skeltons in the closet their just better at hiding them then blizzard is heck i’d trade a morally corrupt company with a passionate dev team over a morally corrupt company with a bunch of inept liers anyday
No really, the novels have been pretty worthless if you were looking to understand the main plot for quite some time. Illidan, Before the Sorm and Shadows Rising are 100% optional, and don’t even add much in the way of insight into the main plot. Indeed, considering things like the Sylvanas PoV in the novels they arguably brought more confusion than clarity. With War Crimes they mucked up so badly that they shifted from pushing important events through their novels. That was 2014. Not exactly current anymore. The free novellas from the BfA prepatch might have been the closest they came to that since, and they don’t add that much either, compared to the ingame depiction. Except better structure, I guess.
And with Shadowlands there is no novel that would give you a deeper understanding. Nor would the “Grimoire” actually help you to understand what’s going on. It is mostly an ingame-story. It just sucks, and the delays and forced mysteries make it offensively awful.
I feel that people like to ascribe more to the novels than there is. That you feel like you are only seeing half the story ingame might be true. That you’ll find the other half in novels sadly isn’t. You just don’t find it anywhere.
well im not saying the novels are all that i’m merely saying that from the pov of people who don’t read them they would seem like a majority of the story is there and minimal effort is in the game i stopped buying them they never get reflected in the game anyway and if they do its very poorly
And I am saying they are wrong. They think the story is there, because it feels incomplete in the game. But it isn’t. The story just feels incomplete no matter if you read the novels or not.
what ff 14 does very well is have a continuing story and things have been subtly hinted at as far back as ARR wow however exist in a vacuum the next expansion don’t feel like the world is progressing it’s frozen in time
exploring kalimdor just proved that blizz has no interest in moving the world forward they status quo it forever it makes for a boring world to be honest
just like their insistence that alliance vs horde is the core of the game despite it rotting the game every time they make a expansion based on this “AMAZING core values” it falls on its face
i think my favorite expansion was mist of pandaria the first half until the faction conflict ruined it for me the Thunder King should have been the final expansion boss
honestly i don’t get the wolk worship it was not that great i only liked the loot system back there none of this rng horse crap i could target my upgrades with currency unlike now where i have to pray rngesus blesses me with the stats i want
I find myself in a niche audience with little pull whilst all the up and comin’ youngsters demand Marvel action in everything they consume.
so they made canon duty finder
